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I have a vlog now. vlogging is cool.

It’s possibly a bit odd to be talking about doing a daily vlog on my not so daily blog. But I wanted to write something about it because this site isn’t going away. I’m not switching from blogging to vlogging. I’m going to, stupidly, do both. I’ll put stuff here when I want / can and my vlog is going to be daily.

So why do a daily vlog? Well 14 years ago I started blogging because I was fascinated by the medium. Here I am 14 years later still doing it. This blog has been running since 2004 so thats 11 years running a photoblog type site. I like having a space to put thoughts. I know its pretty egotistical in a way. I mean who really cares what I have to say?

There’s an inherint risk in producing something like this. Stats. If I publish video and only get 10 views I’ll feel like no-one cares what I’m doing. I’ll feel like I’m failing. It’s stupid but my depressed little monkey brain thinks that way. So what I’m trying to do with the vlog is not care if anyone watches. I’m producing video for me.

I bought a Nikon D90 about 6 years ago. It was the first video DSLR and I was excited to produce video. I wanted to get into it but realistically what happened was that I had no stories to tell. So I’m vlogging to practice making videos. It’s not going to be the best video in the world ever and thats half the point. It’s a vlog. Its rough and ready. It’s about me relaxing about my insane perfectionism and just getting something made every day. Hopefully all this will teach me something.

I want to do it daily so it becomes routine. Weekly makes it easy to fob off. It’s like the Apple Watch. I charge that daily. It’s routine. My Pebble watch I charged when it died which meant some days I would be out and it would die mid-day. I wasn’t in the habbit of charging it. So I want to vlog each day. It’s day 2 and I’m already thinking “YIKES!” but also “This is kinda cool.”

There’s so much cool technology around these days. I’m a geek and I love gadgets but in recent months I’ve sort of become complaicent about my photography gear. Thats good in some ways because if I’m less focused on gear and more focused on producing work then I’ll hopefully make better work. But on the flipside I’m possibly letting all these new things slip by me. I heard recently that by 2017 video will account for 69% of all consumer internet traffic. 69%! That’s insane but kind of understandable given 4k video sizes. I’ve been a bit lazy with video really by sticking to my guns that I’m a photographer first and foremost. But really I just tell stories via visual media whether its in one frame or 24 a second. I’m dong ok at the one frame thing so I need to play with telling stories at 24 frames per second, at movie making. So thats why I’m vlogging.

Here’s vlog 001. Inspired by Casey Neistat as any fan of his will be able to tell. I’m not going to apologise for that as I just want to get stuck in and I’ll figure out my own stuff as we go. Hopefully…